Overview

The Boarduino

The Boarduino is an Ardunio
compatible board designed to plug into solderless breadboards.

Like the Sippino, the Boarduino needs
an FTDI cable in order to be programmed. As my primary interest here is in
Robotics, the USB serial port is superfluous to the project once
the chip is programmed, however the voltage regulator that comes on this
version is quite useful. Further, even though the USB Serial chip isn’t
present, the actual serial port in the ATmega chip is available on the
pins in the breadboard so you can still use it to talk to serial peripherals.

The inclusion of the voltage regulator means that you can take a battery box
with 6 “cells” (6 x AA batteries) plug it into this board, plug this board
into a breadboard, and have the foundation for a nice little robot starter
kit. A couple of modified servos
and some wheels and you’re good to go.

As mentioned the two most compelling features of this flavor of the Arduino
are that it plugs into a breadboard for easy prototyping, and has an on
board voltage regulator. It also has a reset switch and access to the
in-circuit programming pins. Programming is done using a “standard” FTDI
serial cable. There is also a
USB Version which has the USB port (provided 5V and Serial)
which I have not used.